Transparency: Now you see it…

The introduction of a mandatory lobbying disclosure system across the European Union’s top three institutions had been the centerpiece of the Juncker Commission’s ambitious program of governance reform.

Today, that focus on transparency is hard to find.

The future of the EU Transparency Register did not even rate a mention in Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s State of the Union speech Wednesday, even though it had been featured prominently in his July 2014 speech to the European Parliament outlining his top priorities. It also dropped right out of the Commission’s progress report on its 10 priorities for 2015.

Section 10 of the report, which covers governance issues, makes no reference to a reform that in April the Commission’s first vice president, Frans Timmermans, told a transparency conference would be delivered “by the end of this year.”

Juncker’s failure to mention the reform Wednesday, and its absence from another Commission document, has left transparency campaigners and members of the European Parliament asking whether the agreement remains on the table.

“In terms of transparency, the most important element of that part of Juncker’s priorities upon assuming office was to get a new mandatory register,” said Daniel Freund from Transparency International, a German-based NGO. “It would be a shame if this turns out to be an empty promise.”

In November 2014, the incoming executive presented its work program for the following year, which promised to reach a deal to extend the Commission’s new transparency regime to both European Parliament and the Council of the EU, as part of an ambitious inter-institutional agreement.

The current scheme is voluntary: Only those lobbyists who seek official access to the Parliament and top Commission officials need to sign up. However, there is no mechanism in place to vet the information provided, which has led to concerns about its reliability.

Juncker has said he wants to create a “mandatory” register that would make European institutions “open about who is influencing the decision-making process.”

The push for greater transparency was central to Juncker’s 2014 election campaign following the 2012-2013 tobacco lobbying scandal known as “Dalligate,” which led to the first-ever firing of a sitting commissioner and placed the EU’s then-weak transparency rules under the spotlight.

Once in power, Juncker moved swiftly to implement reforms, placing the EU Transparency Register, which is jointly administered by the Commission and Parliament, at the center of a new disclosure regime.

Since December 2014, commissioners, their cabinets and top public servants are allowed to meet only lobbyists who are signed up to the Transparency Register. Those meetings must then be disclosed.

The new inter-institutional deal, if enacted, would extend the Commission’s regime to officials and politicians of the Parliament, and officials of the Council’s secretariat.

The Commission insists that the central plank of its transparency plan has not been scuttled or put on the back-burner.

“Preparatory work is ongoing and the Commission still intends to bring forward a proposal as announced in the Work Program,” a spokesperson said, while declining to say what progress had been made on it.

But experts argue that Commission could struggle to negotiate a complex arrangement on transparency with the European Parliament and the Council before the end of the year.

Parliamentary officials who have been working on the proposal say part of the problem is that the Commission has been overwhelmed with the delivery of its Better Regulation reform program and has not been able to turn its attention to delicate negotiations with the Council and Parliament over transparency.

“They had to choose whether to focus on the inter-institutional agreement on better regulation or the inter-institutional agreement for a mandatory transparency register,” one Parliament source said. “They went with the first option.”

If the Commission is not able to meet its 2015 deadline to reach a deal, this could create problems for Parliament, where MEPs have been working on the assumption that the agreement would be in place by the end of the year.

Sven Giegold, a German Green MEP who has worked on transparency issues, said he was “disappointed and concerned” that promised reforms do not appear to be forthcoming.

“Parliament is ready for these reforms,” Giegold said. “We have committed negotiators and have made clear commitments.”

Giegold, a member of Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee, has been working on a raft of transparency reforms, including reforming the MEPs’ code of conduct and freedom of information rules. Uncertainty over the inter-institutional agreement has raised concerns over the timeline of these reforms, with parliamentary officials saying they are “frustrated” by the delay.

Others are pushing reform ideas of their own. German MEP Julia Reda (Greens/EFA) is set to announce that her office has developed open-source software which could be used by MEPs (if supported by a server) to disclose meetings as they are entered in parliament’s scheduling program. The software would also link to a visiting organization’s entry in the Transparency Register.

Yet for the reforms to take hold, the Commission must secure the approval of the Council, which has not changed the cautious position on the issue it outlined in 2011, when it said it was broadly supportive of the idea of expanding the scope of the Transparency Register.

However, a document obtained by POLITICO in February revealed that the Council’s legal services had advised against signing up to an agreement, warning it would lead to “legal risks and political confusion.”

“The Council’s potential participation in a…transparency register has been discussed many times at the General Affairs Council,” an EU official said. “Yet in spite of these discussions, it is possible to say that the Council 2011 position has not changed.”

The Council’s legal services document reveals concern that an inter-institutional agreement may be extended to the permanent representations — the influential delegations of the EU’s 28 member countries, which are heavily lobbied but are currently under no obligation to reveal who they have met.

However, the push for transparency in EU countries has recently gathered momentum, with Ireland’s tough new standards set to be fully implemented next year and France expected to adopt a public service integrity bill in November.

Under the Irish reforms, lobbyists will be required to disclose their contact with politicians and government officials. Initially, Irish government authorities had assumed that would extend to politicians and officials working abroad — including MEPs and officials at Ireland’s permanent representation.

However, an Irish government official told POLITICO that, after seeking clarification on the “extra-territoriality” side of the lobbying rules, the Irish government has concluded that the legislation “does not apply to lobbying activities taking place outside the [Irish] state.” However, lobbyists contacting Irish officials and politicians abroad will be “encouraged to voluntarily register such activities.”

It remains uncertain whether the French permanent representative will be affected by reforms in Paris.